The White House's Collage of Lies - Josh Marshall
By JOSH MARSHALL Published MAY 10, 2017 4:21 PM
I mentioned in the earlier post that it feels to me like the White House is losing control of this story. I want to follow up by looking at what White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in today’s presser. She said a lot that was all over the place. But I want to focus on her essentially giving three overlapping and at least partly contradictory explanations for why the President fired James Comey.
The first was a version of the story from yesterday: the DOJ leadership told him to. According to Sanders, Rod Rosenstein visited the White House Monday and told the President that he believed Comey should be fired. The President, in essence, asked for it in writing. He received the letters Tuesday and promptly acted on the advice and fired Comey.
She also said that the President has been thinking about firing Comey since he entered office and has slowly lost confidence in his leadership of the FBI. I thought I heard her say that he’s thought about firing Comey every day since he was inaugurated. But I couldn’t find that in the transcript. If she did say it, it would be one of the few statements I find credible.
Sanders also said that the President was particularly troubled by Comey’s testimony last Wednesday in which he described and justified his decisions to make public pronouncements about the Clinton emails probe. He was apparently disturbed that Comey disregarded the DOJ chain of command. This was just one more thing, in Sanders’ telling, that sapped Trump’s confidence. It may even have been something like the final straw. In one of several references to Comey’s Wednesday testimony Sanders said …
I think the biggest catalyst was last Wednesday. Director Comey made a startling revelation that he had taken a stick of dynamite and thrown it into the Department of Justice by going around the chain of command when he decided to take steps without talking to the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General when holding a press conference and telling them he would not let them know what he was going to say.
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